A fond farewell

A loss for the Dallas Arts District: Founding executive director Veletta Lill tostep down

Veletta Lill, Dallas Arts District founding executive director, announced shewill step down in November.
Lill steps down immediately after the grand opening of Klyde Warren Park.

The Dallas Arts District is going stronger than ever, but it's about to lose one of its leaders: Veletta Lill has announced that she will resign from her position as founding executive director of the nonprofit that oversees the 68-acre district, effective November 1.

"I had been thinking about [stepping down] since my mother died in June," Lill says. "It was just kind of a rough year in terms of that."

Lill's tenure as executive director has bookends of sorts. The former Dallas City Council member (1997-2005) came on board in January 2009, taking the lead of the new organization just months before the opening of the AT&T Performing Arts Center. She leaves soon after the debut of Dallas City Performance Hall and directly following the opening of Klyde Warren Park, a fact that also played a part in her decision.

"The opening of the [new] facilities is kind of a turning point," Lill says. "I felt those were seminal moments in the history of the district, and that was why I made this decision. I certainly wanted to be there for those openings."

In a statement, Dallas Arts District acting president and CEO Doug Curtis Curtis praised Lill for her leadership and positive contributions to the city. "Veletta's impact – while on council and in leading the Dallas Arts District – cannot be underestimated," he said. "Through planning, construction and expansion ... she helped keep everyone's eyes on the prize: creating the finest arts district in the nation. Her attention to detail is what makes her an exceptional leader."

Lill is rightly proud of her legacy. "It was really important for us to come together as a neighborhood, and that is something I worked on, to sort of knit together the diverse constituencies of the district — not just the arts institutions, but the churches and the school and the commercial developments," she says. "It's been been an amazing ride and a great time to be here."

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GIFTED AND TALENTED

SMU historian Ariel Ron wins prestigious $800k MacArthur genius grant

Photo courtesy of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

SMU historian Ariel Ron will receive $800,000 — no strings attached.

Three Texans have been named 2026 MacArthur Fellows, one of the most prestigious honors in the U.S. for artists, scientists, and scholars. Among them is Dallas historian and author Ariel Ron, who directs the Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University.

San Antonio's Vincent Valdez and San Marcos-based anthropologist Kate Spradley were also on the 2026 list of 20 recipients of the “genius grants” given by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Each fellow will receive $800,000 over five years, with no strings attached.

Individuals do not apply for the honor. The grants are awarded via a confidential, multi-step process managed by the foundation, and many recipients express surprise that they were considered for the fellowship.

“While individuals will have a track record of significant achievement, the fellowship is not a lifetime achievement award — it is an investment in a person's originality, insight, and potential,” wrote MacArthur on its website. “The Fellows Program is proactively working to foster and enable innovative, imaginative, and ground-breaking ideas, thinking, and strategies.”

Ron's research focuses on how Northern agriculture shaped economic growth and federal power in 19th-century America. Grassroots Leviathan: Agricultural Reform and the Rural North in the Slaveholding Republic, his 2020 book, challenges the notion of an industrial North versus an agrarian South.

"My approach is to identify and look carefully at things that everyone knows to be important but are somehow too obvious-seeming to look at closely," Ron says in a video on the MacArthur Foundation's website. "If you scratch the surface a little bit, you discover that there are a lot of interesting things that might change the way we think about bigger questions."

Valdez, who splits his time between San Antonio and Houston, is known for large, hyperrealistic drawings and paintings of Mexican American life. More recently, he has turned his focus to broader sociopolitical issues in works like The Strangest Fruit, a series of paintings confronting the lynching of Latinos.

At Texas State University in San Marcos, forensic anthropologist Spradley founded Operation Identification in 2013 — a program that identifies and repatriates the remains of migrants who died along the Texas-Mexico border. She is also a cofounder of the Forensic Border Coalition, which pushes for policy changes at the local and national levels. Spradley is the school’s first MacArthur Fellow.

A full list of the 2026 MacArthur Fellows can be found online.

arts grants macarthur grants southern methodist university visual arts